Related papers: Depletion interactions modulate coupled folding an…
Bonding between polymers below the glass transition temperature through molecular-scale dilatation (or densification)-based interdiffusion of macromolecules has recently been introduced. In this mechanism, short timeframe plastic…
We consider a model for the dynamics of active cells interacting with their quiescent counterparts under the influence of acidity characterized by proton concentration. The active cells perform nonlinear diffusion and infer proliferation or…
A discrete model for the sintering of polydisperse, inhomogeneous arrays of cylinders is presented with empirical contact force-laws, taking into account plastic deformations, cohesion, temperature dependence (melting), and long-time…
The possibility to induce demixing in a colloidal mixture by adding small polymers, or other equivalent depletant agents, is theoretically investigated. By use of Mean Field Theory, suitably generalized to deal with short range effective…
We investigate the role played by the bidispersity of polymer chains on the local structure and the potential of mean force (PMF) between silica nanoparticles (NPs) in a polystyrene melt. We use the hybrid particle-field molecular dynamics…
We present a multiscale approach to model diffusion in a crowded environment and its effect on the reaction rates. Diffusion in biological systems is often modeled by a discrete space jump process in order to capture the inherent noise of…
We show that an analogy between crowding in fluid and jammed phases of hard spheres captures the density dependence of the kissing number for a family of numerically generated jammed states. We extend this analogy to jams of mixtures of…
When non-adsorbing polymers are added to an isotropic suspension of rod-like colloids, the colloids effectively attract each other via depletion forces. We performed Monte Carlo simulations to study the phase diagram of such rod-polymer…
Diffusion is a fundamental phenomenon that occurs ubiquitously in nature and remains the subject of continuous research interest. Understanding diffusion is a key to understanding leaving systems. In this Chapter, I discuss diffusion of…
From bird flocks and fish schools to migrating cell sheets, collective motion is a ubiquitous biological phenomenon that inspires quantitative modeling through self-propelled particle (SPP) frameworks. Conventional SPP models prescribe…
Collection of self-propelled particles (SPPs) exhibit coherent motion and show true long-range order in two-dimensions. Inhomogeneity, in general destroys the usual long-range order of the polar SPPs. We model a system of polar…
Soft colloids allow to explore high density states well beyond random close packing. An important open question is whether softness controls the dynamics under these dense conditions. While experimental works reported conflicting results,…
We study flexible polymer macromolecules in a crowded (porous) environment, modelling them as self-attracting self-avoiding walks (SASAW) on site-diluted percolative lattices in space dimensions d=2, 3. The influence of stretching force on…
The emergence of collective motion, also known as flocking or swarming, in groups of moving individuals who orient themselves using only information from their neighbors is a very general phenomenon that is manifested at multiple spatial…
Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) do not possess well-defined three-dimensional structures in solution under physiological conditions. We develop all-atom, united-atom, and coarse-grained Langevin dynamics simulations for the IDP…
In many industrial processes, pieces of the same polymer material are brought into contact at a temperature above the glass transition. Interdiffusion then takes place across the interface and leads to a strengthening of the junction.…
Understanding the bulk and interfacial properties of super-concentrated electrolytes, such as ionic liquids (ILs), has attracted significant attention lately for their promising applications in supercapacitors and batteries. Recently,…
Living cells are characterized by the micrometric confinement of various macromolecules at high concentrations. Using droplets containing binary polymer blends as artificial cells, we previously showed that cell-sized confinement causes…
Understanding the hydrodynamic alignment of colloidal rods in polymer solutions is pivotal for manufacturing structurally ordered materials. How polymer crowding influences the flow-induced alignment of suspended colloidal rods remains…
Protein folding produces characteristic and functional three-dimensional structures from unfolded polypeptides or disordered coils. The emergence of extraordinary complexity in the protein folding process poses astonishing challenges to…